Shashi Tharoor: Nehru: A BiographyAs a young Indian child growing up in America, I heard stories about India's independence movement from my parents. I was told about Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. I had trouble believing that a single individual could have so much impact on the world. After reading, Shashi Tharoor's book, I've changed my mind.
Tharoor's analysis of the intertwining between an individual's biography and the birth of a nation is masterful. The book stays close to its subject, Nehru, but then ventures to link his biography to many of the Indian institutions we now take for granted, including: secularism, democracy, non-alignment, and the country's prowess in science and math. This is a highly readable book and I strongly recommend it to any reader interested in learning about India, its culture, and its first leader.

Mary Douglas: How Institutions ThinkThis book will re-wire your mind. If you ever believed that what we take for reality is mostly a projected societal consensus rather than objective fact, read this book. In addition to being a first-class theorist who can identify critical mechanisms for the social construction of reality, she is fantastic writer. I couldn't sleep for days after reading this book.

July 28, 2005

Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) have articles about how adolescence is increasingly being stretched into adulthood. The Wall Street Journal article describes parental involvement in their children's college education. It looks like the baby-boomers are presenting a problem not only for the social security system, but college administrators. The article describes this social phenomenon as "A new generation of overinvolved parents [who] are
flooding campus orientations, meddling in registration and interfering
with students' dealings with professors, administrators and roommates".

The article points to two causes. First, many parents no longer see college as an opportunity for their children, but rather in financial terms. Education is no longer about expanding the mind or a means for becoming a better citizen, but as an investment. Consequently, parents expect a return on that investment. They also expect colleges and universities to treat them like "customers." Second, the article suggests that students themselves have become enfeebled. A bottle-fed upbringing has created a dependent generation that expects their parents to solve all their problems. The children, in other words, have been socialized into stunted adulthood. Psychologists call this dependency phenomenon "learned helplessness." I think there is a another sociological phenomenon going on here as well. First, many of these parents are part of the 1970s generation. This generation, as Daniel Yankelovich noted in his groundbreaking values study, represented a distinct break from the values that had characterized post-war America. This generation is skeptical of all institutions--big or small, private or public.

The relationship of this "new breed" of Americans to their children is also quite different, some social scientists now argue. Whereas American parents had traditionally seen socializing independence into their children as their most important role, this new group sees their children as extensions of their own identity. Their childrens success or failure is seen as a marker of their own success or failure. This group, nurtured on EST and the self-help movements that characterized this period, often describes its goals in abstract, fuzzy terms, such as 'self-fulfillment', 'growing', 'being happy'. [I should note that I don't think there is nothing wrong with these goals but they are difficult to achieve because they are so fluid.] There is very little, Yankelovich argued, that is other oriented, it is all inner-directed. That is, "it is all about me." When they think about others, it is usually refracted from their own viewpoint.

The New York Times article focuses on kids "lifting" things from their parents. Apparently, there is a significant enough group of thirty-somethings who visit with their parents and raid their underwear drawers, if not the drawers themselves, to merit an article.

I myself don't think there is much difference between the current generation and previous generation. The difference may be in sampling. There have always been dependent and independent children. However, given the increased competition for college admissions, it is possible that certain schools are likely seeing more of the "dependent group." The reason is that this group is more likely to have been walked through the college application process, had their essays re-touched, if not actually drafted, by their parents. I imagine that parents who are obsessed with where their child goes to nursery school, may be of a certain type that is concerned with where their child goes to college. So, the result is a selection in type, not an overall generational effect.

July 04, 2005

I've been on a self-imposed blogging holiday. The reason is that I've been drafting chapters for my new book about business schools. I have a draft of Part I of the book which introduces the subject and describes the founding of business schools from 1881 (Founding of Wharton) through the Great Depression. I will be posting excerpts in the upcoming weeks and look forward to comments, suggestions, thoughts, and ideas.

I am now revising Part II of the book which focuses on the institutionalization of business schools in the post War Period to about 1971. My goal is to be able to these chapters by the end of the summer.